2017

I had a free evening earlier this month and put together a submission to the House of Lords Constitution Committee’s Legislative Process Inquiry. You can find my submission here. Here is a brief excerpt: Henry VIII clauses are constitutionally exceptional and exceptionable. Several examples can be given from jurisdictions with written and unwritten constitutions. […] Read more

President Trump’s Executive Order on immigration derives its authority from the following statutory provision: Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall […] Read more

American public lawyers have found themselves a little bit short of material in recent times. With Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court of the United States still unfilled months after his death, the eight-member Court has released few high-profile decisions. For instance, in the eagerly anticipated litigation on President Obama’s immigration reforms, the Court […] Read more

Readers will be interested to note that the bill that responds to the UK Supreme Court’s judgment in Miller has now been published. The European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill contains one substantive section, which provides: (1) The Prime Minister may notify, under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention […] Read more

From the UK Supreme Court’s decision this morning in Miller it is quite clear that legislation is required to authorise the triggering of Article 50. But what form should such legislation take? The majority decision does not give much explicit guidance. At para. 86, we are told that there must be “domestic sanction” in “appropriate […] Read more

In a week that is likely to be dominated by the public law implications of Brexit — the UK Supreme Court will hand down its much-anticipated decision in the Article 50 litigation tomorrow — I thought it would be timely to draw your attention to some related international law issues. Brexit, and more particularly Scotexit, […] Read more

When Emilie Taman sought to run for office in the last Canadian general election, she was refused permission to do so by the Public Service Commission. That refusal has now been set aside: Taman v. Canada (Attorney General), 2017 FCA 1. However, as I will explain, it has been set aside in a way which […] Read more

A topic to which I had not given a great deal of thought before I taught it last Term as part of an LLM seminar on “Legislation” is the form of emergency legislation. As someone who lived through the 2000s and spent time in U.S. universities whilst the executive branch claimed significant authority to act […] Read more

When I was a doctoral student, I spent months trying to track down an essay by Harold Laski: ‘The Limitations of the Expert’ (1931) 162 Harper’s Monthly Magazine 101 (Fabian Tract No. 235). I eventually found it in a rare books collection at Harvard University while I was there as a visiting researcher. Finally finding […] Read more

I recently received my complimentary copy of a new edited collection, Matthew Groves and Greg Weeks eds., Legitimate Expectations in the Common Law World (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2017). The title is available for pre-order here. The editors write: The recognition and enforcement of legitimate expectations by courts has been a striking feature of English law […] Read more